Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/150

 classicized by another Italian, and debased by a German Jew. This only enhances the significance of that French dramatic sense which stimulated foreign composers and widened their choice of subjects, as it also preserved all except the Italian forms of opera from falling into that elsewhere prevalent early 19th-century operatic style in which there was no means of guessing by the music whether any situation was tragic or comic. From the time of Meyerbeer onwards, trivial and vulgar opera has been as common in France as elsewhere; but there is a world of difference between, for example, a garish tune naïvely intended for a funeral march, and a similar tune used in a serious situation with a dramatic sense of its association with other incidents in the opera, and of its contrast with the sympathies of spectators and actors. The first case is as typical of 19th-century musical Italy as the second case is of musical France and all that has come under French influence.

As Wagner slowly and painfully attained his maturity he learned to abhor the influence of Meyerbeer, and indeed it accounts for much of the inequality of his earlier work. But it can hardly have failed to stimulate his sense of effect; and without the help of Meyerbeer’s outwardly successful novelties it is doubtful whether even Wagner’s determination could have faced the task of his early work, a task so negative and destructive in its first stages. We have elsewhere (see, ad finem, and ) described how if music of any kind, instrumental or dramatic, was to advance beyond the range of the classical symphony, there was need to devise a kind of musical motion and proportion as different from that of the sonata or symphony as the sonata style is different from that of the suite. All the vexed questions of the function of vocal ensemble, of the structure of the libretto, and of instrumentation, are but aspects and results of this change in what is as much a primary category of music as extension is a primary category of matter. Wagnerian opera, a generation after Wagner’s death, was still an unique phenomenon, the rational influence of which was not yet sifted from the concomitant confusions of thought prevalent among many composers of symphony, oratorio, and other forms of which Wagner’s principles can be relevant only with incalculable modifications. With Wagner the history of classical opera ends and a new history begins, for in Wagner’s hands opera first became a single art-form, a true and indivisible music-drama, instead of a kind of dramatic casket for a collection of objets d’art more or less aptly arranged in theatrical tableaux.

Forms and Terminology of Opera.

The history of pre-Wagnerian opera is not, like that of the sonata forms, a history in which the technical terminology has a clear relationship to the aesthetic development. In order to understand the progress of classical opera we must understand the whole progress of classical music; and this not merely for the general reason that the development of an art-form is inseparable from the development of the whole art, but because in the case of opera only the most external terminology and the most unreal and incoherent history of fashions and factions remain for consideration after the general development of musical art has been discussed. For completeness, however, the terminology must be included; and a commentary on it will complete our sketch in better historical perspective than any attempt to amplify details on the lines of a continuous history.

1. Secco-recitative is the delivery of ordinary operatic dialogue in prosaic recitative-formulas, accompanied by nothing but a harpsichord or pianoforte. In comic operas it was not so bad a method as some critics imagine; for the conductor (who sat at the harpsichord or pianoforte) would, if he had the wits expected of him by the composer, extemporize his accompaniments in an unobtrusively amusing manner, while the actors delivered their recitative rapidly in a conversational style known as parlante. In serious operas, however, the conductor dare not be frivolous; and accordingly secco-recitative outside comic opera is the dreariest of makeshifts, and is not tolerated by Gluck in his mature works. He accompanies his recitatives with the string band, introducing other instruments freely as the situation suggests.

2. Accompanied recitative was used in all kinds of opera, as introductory to important arias and other movements, and also in the course of finales. Magnificent examples abound in Idomeneo, Figaro and Don Giovanni; and one of the longest recitatives before Wagner is that near the beginning of the finale of the first act of Die Zauberflöte. Beethoven’s two examples in Fidelio are short but of overwhelming pathos.

3. Melodrama is the use of an orchestral accompaniment to spoken dialogue (see ). It is wonderfully promising in theory, but generally disappointing in effect, unless the actors are successfully trained to speak without being dragged by the music into an out-of-tune sing-song. Classical examples are generally short and cautious, but very impressive; there is one in Fidelio in which the orchestra quotes two points from earlier movements in a thoroughly Wagnerian way (see Leitmotif below). But the device is more prominent in incidental music to plays, as in Beethoven’s music for Goethe’s Egmont. Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains the most brilliant and resourceful examples yet achieved in this art; but they are beyond the musical capacity of the English stage, which, however, has practised the worst forms of the method until it has become a disease, many modern performances of Shakespeare attaining an almost operatic continuity of bad music.

4. Opera buffa is classical Italian comic opera with secco-recitative. Its central classics are, of course, Figaro and Don Giovanni, while Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto and Rossini’s Barbiere are the most important steps from the culmination to the fall.

5. Opera seria is classical Italian opera with secco-recitative; almost always (like the Handelian opera from which it is derived) on a Greek or Roman subject, and, at whatever cost to dramatic or historic propriety, with a happy ending. Gluck purposely avoids the term in his mature works. The only great classic in opera seria is Mozart’s Idomeneo, and even that is dramatically too unequal to be more than occasionally revived, though it contains much of Mozart’s finest music.

6. The Singspiel is German opera with spoken dialogue. In early stages it advanced from the farcical to the comic. With Beethoven it came under French influence and adopted “thrilling” stories with happy endings; and from this stage it passed to specifically “Romantic” subjects. Its greatest classics are Mozart’s Entführung and Zauberflöte, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Weber’s Freischütz.

7. Opéra comique is the Singspiel of France, being French opera with spoken dialogue. It did not originate in farce but in the refusal of the Académie de Musique to allow rival companies to infringe its monopoly of Grand Opéra; and it is so far from being essentially comic that one of its most famous classics, Méhul’s Joseph, is on a Biblical subject; while its highest achievement, Cherubini’s Les Deux journées, is on a story almost as serious as that of Fidelio. All Cherubini’s mature operas (except the ballet Anacréon, which is uninterrupted music from beginning to end) are operas comiques in the sense of having spoken dialogue; though Medée, being, perhaps, the first genuine tragedy in the history of music-drama, is simply called “opéra” on the title-page. In the smaller French works, especially those in one act, there is so much spoken dialogue that they are almost like plays with incidental music. But they never sink to the condition of the so-called operas of the English composers since Handel. When Weber accepted the commission to write Oberon for the English stage in 1825, he found that he was compelled to set the musical numbers one by one as they were sent to him, without the slightest information as to the plot, the situation, or even the order of the pieces! And, to crown his disgust, he found that this really did not matter.